Publishing Field Report 7 – Calamari Press (Part 2)

Unpacking the nuts and bolts of publishing my first book and how that would inform what I sought from publishing in general w/r/t design, distribution, promotion, compensation, & aura

I’ve thoroughly covered the lead-up to how I found a publisher for my first book after a long search. Now I’d like to get into thinking about the more nuts and bolts effects of the experience working with a micro publisher, and how it would affect my future efforts in writing and publishing.

There seems to be a baseline assumption among writers that the end goal is always to end up at the biggest publisher possible—hopefully a big five, we think, as much for the rubber stamp of validity that level of acceptance supposedly signifies as the possibility of getting paid.

After having worked with a variety of both small and large presses, however, I no longer believe this superstition is the case. In my mind, there are very clear pluses and minuses to both experiences, and the eventual effects aren’t always as apparent in the moment as they might be in looking back and seeing what comes after publication—the life of the book.

The life of the book does turn out to be quite different from the life of the author, after all. The author, hopefully, continues to move on, do other things, while the book is only ever what the author made of it while it was still possible to change. Once the book’s in print, unless you end up revisiting it one day, it will always serve to emblemize who the author had been once—for better and for worse.

It is simultaneously a relief to realize this—that the book is done, and you no longer have to live inside it as a creator anymore—and a horror—to discover that by the time the book is something with its own body, you often hardly recognize it anymore. It’s almost dead in that way, at least for you; meanwhile, for everyone else, it’s like your face—a first and last glimpse into something else about you you can’t see, and cannot change. It should be no surprise that many authors end up giving up after their first time, finding themselves no longer willing to jump through so many hoops just to end up with hacked off limbs.

Even bearing that in mind, there’s something wonderful about putting the past in the past and moving on. Publication, when done well, allows the author the chance to disconnect themselves from that dead load, and, if they’re willing, start thinking about what else they might be.

There are tons of ways to break this down so I’m going to try to discuss my experience with Calamari through a variety of lenses and perhaps just around to see what sticks.

DESIGN

Very early on, I knew one of the most important things to me about publishing a book was that it looked good. “You can’t judge a book by its cover” turns out to only be true about its insides, after all, and half the battle to getting someone to consider reading you begins with the book as an object. We’ve all seen great books maligned by ugly covers so tacky you can’t help but wonder what sort of tastemaker decided to release it into the world. Like it or not, the design of a book turns out to be an essential part of the experience for most readers, and so keeping this in mind when considering publishers shouldn’t be left by the wayside. In some ways, a publisher’s catalog and how they represent it tells you something about the care they put into their work, and through it may not doom you to have a book with a dud cover, it’s not ideal.

Calamari was very attractive to me as a publisher for this reason. Derek designs all his own books down to the tiniest detail, including (where conducive) illustrating the interior with custom artwork that gives his catalog a very distinctive look (I’ll refrain from the word brand, which Derek would loathe). Seeing the amount of care he puts into each title gave me confidence that I could trust him to make my own book as strong as possible, with a mode of taste that we both shared.

Every time I’ve sought a smaller press publisher since, I’ve used this as a criterion for narrowing down my list of possibilities. There’s nothing worse than having to live with a book you can’t stand to look at, and so this is why being familiar with a publisher’s backlog is so important.

This is less so with major publishers, where you’re sort of trading off some of amount of control to the marketing department in exchange for a potentially larger range of audience. Majors tend to think they know what sells—or at least what gets positioned well in chain stores—and so your personal aesthetic might have to take a backseat when there’s real money involved. I’ve been lucky to have been allowed to voice my input in those large venues too, so it’s not necessarily a death knell to have to trust the corporate structure to provide, despite the horror stories that do occur.

Calamari was ideal, though, especially for an early work, in setting the bar where I wanted it to be. Derek was very flexible, too, in making sure I agreed with his choices, and adjusting as we went. To this day, I’m still really thrilled by the way the book turned out as an object, and I feel certain if I hadn’t worked with someone so determined to build aura around the text, I would have a less physical understanding of what becomes of one’s writing after the writing itself is finished. It can, in certain situations, actually help you imagine that your writing belongs somewhere, has its own shape that will lend life to the text itself.

Taking care to find someone who cares about the book as much as you do is no easy task, but it’s worth the wait. Publishing, no matter how you slice it, is extremely slow, and though it feels good sometimes to rush forward blindly, as with one’s hair on fire, you might not quite end up where you thought when someday you finally look back.

DISTRIBUTION

Most every writer wants to see their book in stores. What sets small presses so far apart from the majors in most people’s minds, I think, is as much about a wider frame of access as anything else, and in this department, small presses are definitely at a disadvantage across the board. It’s simply not a competition—big houses have the money and relationships to feed their products outward, period.

This doesn’t mean, however, that if you publish with a small press you’re doomed to obscurity. If I’ve learned anything about the business side of publishing, it’s that no one actually knows what people want, much less how to find the next big thing and make it big.

Publishing is a game of luck most of the time, which is why big publishers use their budgets to try to force feed readers into buying whether they really want to or not. The book itself is often rarely the issue—it’s why and how and whether it’s seen.

Put that way, it’s kind of easy to see why lots of big press titles fail to sell—they’ve been mismarked. There’s hardly enough there in certain books to swing the bat past the point of sale, and through readers may be gullible when it comes to buying in, they’re not going to fall in love with being bored. Major publishers make up for this by taking shots on things that seem like they can be a hit, when in truth most books won’t be. For them, often all it takes is one breakout to pay for the whole show, and therefore we as readers are left to wade through shit to pay their bills.

Calamari Press had little to no distribution outside direct sales and the smattering of weight carried by the since defunct once-primary indie distributor, SPD. My book wasn’t going to be in Borders, I understood—but it was going to be published into a catalog that I already respected more than most of the books a Borders sells. Being on a label with writers I thought of as icons felt immediately more valuable in that light—I was a part of something now, and though the potential audience therein might be thinner than if I’d found my way into the mainstream, which mattered more in the long run?

I think many writers end up thinking too top heavy along these lines, thinking that more exposure is always better exposure. But what about when the bigger spotlight fails to launch you right out of the box onto the bestsellers list (which doesn’t even necessarily come hand in hand with acclaim)? What does the author of a major house book have after their press cycle ends if everybody knows their publisher saw them as a glorified lottery ticket?

A good way to parse this is to think of music. There are bands, like Backstreet Boys, that are manufactured by their label to be stars and sell records by brute force; then there are bands that start small and build their audience by touring and releasing interesting records, slowly spreading their name over time by putting the work first and eventually ending up with enough cache that even a bean counter can see their worth.

Being a Backstreet Boy as an author is embarrassing, no? At least the musicians get to have sex. You, you’re just a doily who couldn’t figure out that writing rarely produces groupies, much less a living wage or a sense of self worth.

My point here is that not all books needs thousands of eyes on them out of the gate, and you never know what the first stepping stone in your publishing career could provide in its establishing a basis from which to grow. It should matter less to more people what web hoopla gets spilled over your appearance on the market and more so how taking care of the work first allows for greater and finer possibilities, the likes of which you’ll never know until you know.  

DISSEMINATION / PROMOTION

I’m lumping these two subjects together because in a way they’re symbiotic—and rather than being the product of a sprint, as it often feels like with major houses, most real lasting effects from a book object arrive over time.

I often think of DFW saying he couldn’t take the positive reviews of Infinite Jest seriously in the first months of its release because he knew no one could read and process a 1000-page book that fast. The same holds true for any book, too, in that we often fail to see the effect of what any book actually is long after the spectacle of its release into the world.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the leash of a book on a major press is often much, much shorter than with a small press. Since most big publishers are looking to make a dime and having invested as such in the book to the degree they believe it will pay off, a new release really needs to hit the ground running in order to maintain a major publisher’s attention.

This window might as short as even a week—you end up in the Times or NYer or you don’t; the book somehow goes viral or it doesn’t; or you’re already so famous that stores are pushing your work based on the momentum of the past that it doesn’t matter either way.

This, in my mind, is why we’ve continued to see a narrowing of the field of play when it comes to majors. Their tolerance for risk (by which I mean monetary risk) forces their hand to stick to safe plays to keep the ocean liner afloat—all these in-house editors and publicists have salaries, after all, which provides them the time to focus on their projects in a way that independently run presses can’t. When the bottom line is profit, why stick your nose out?

Very quickly, then, we see the potential energy investment in a new voice or a new idea get rerouted back to the mainsails. The up-front cost is written off as loss, like a broke ass scratch off, and the book itself ends up hardly more than a reminder of what it might have been if there’d been a better climate to fall into or create. And again—NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING, THEY’RE JUST GUESSING, so when they fail, time to move on.

Calamari, on the other hand, is dedicated to keeping their books in print. Derek doesn’t publish books he wouldn’t want to keep hand-selling a decade later, and therefore, fifteen years after the fact, Ever is still in stock and for sale. When the reserves run low, he orders more, and sends me an email to say so, including paying royalties on what’s sold since. It’s a much looser model than other publishers—and not one I would necessarily accept if I didn’t know and believe in Derek’s ethics—but again, I didn’t choose to publish this book with him because I need to live off it year-to-year.

Meanwhile, I’ve had books go out of print at bigger houses without ever hearing a word. I don’t have a contact at them I can write to in order to find out, and I know there’s no one in house there anymore who even remembers I exist. No one’s selling the book after that first blast, and the book suffers for that as a result.

COMPENSATION

Maybe the biggest difference, of course, between indie and big 5, is that I got an advance on my sales from the latter, which while nice, is money long since spent. Today it almost feels like buying off my attention for caring for the book—as at this point I’d much rather feel like the book I sold is still alive. I like being able to trust Derek with my work on word alone, by knowing his ethics and seeing what he puts into the world, rather than needing paperwork and framework to see to it that I get taken care of.

Because here’s the thing—no matter who you publish with (and I’m talking about literary writing here, not glorified comic and cook books) the amount of work and time it takes to write and publish a book is inherently disproportionate from the capital it generates its author. That’s how it is. If you can’t stand the thought of working 2000 hours over four years to make $10,000, you’re better off doing just about anything else. There are, of course, exceptions, though they are even more few and far between than you might think—certainly more rare than winning the lottery, and so far beyond your or anyone’s control that it’s essentially a pipe dream (or dare I say a ponzi scheme).

That said, the raw sales of a book aren’t the end all be all when it comes to earning, if you’re in it for the long game. I’ve always thought of my writing as an investment in myself, in that way—not a hustle I perform to get a check, but rather a practice I maintain because to me the work of writing is more like play than pushing pencils. My scorn for those who seem to write for fame and money comes from exactly this—You’d have to be a fucking idiot to think it's worth it in the way we measure professional success in other fields. It’s an insult to the conceit of literature itself that one should manifest the kind of veneer required of a lawyer or an influencer, for instance—not because ‘literary arts’ deserves preciousness, but because everything outside the work is a mirage. Even the biggest self-excited ham, I think, knows this deep down, and if somehow they don’t they’ll find out fast. This is why we cursory literary scenes develop and then disburse—people come in thinking they’re going to get famous, and then realize fame in literature is like a Band-Aid on a gorge.

So it seems like I’m saying you’d have to be insane to be a writer, and I sort of think you really do—if by insane you mean not beholden to the market and its values. Some people seem to think professing this viewpoint is snotty or willful in some way, and indeed sticking around in the industrial quadrants of an aesthetic pursuit might turn you angsty in a hurry—par for the course. The difference between those who give up and say fuck off and those who make something like a career out of making art is being able to remember that all this business babble about the professionalistic aspects of writing is secondhand; it won’t sustain you, and in fact, you have to learn to sustain it. Or—if you’re really wise—you can just write the work you want and forget about the rest of it while you still can. In the end, nothing beats the feeling of making something that is yours on your terms, like a secret only you might ever know.

AURA/ARC

I want to close this discussion out with a larger frame; in particular one that speaks to the concept of working for a living. In the shifting of the market toward numbers, I think we too often think of sustainable practice in the arts on a 1:1 scale—meaning that it seems like we either have to choose to work earnestly in obscurity, or choose to ‘sell out’ (a term that’s changed since its heyday, but still has merit in proper context) and therefore make enough immediate income to survive.

Though I began writing knowing that I’d have to make a living outside the writing, and therefore had to make sacrifices along the way, I can also say that staying true to myself by trusting my own vision and process for sustaining that vision has led to something like a life, more than a career. Even though if I counted up my hourlies on a per word basis and compared it to the checks I cashed publishing books I’d realize writing for money is often worse than a sweatshop, paying pennies on the hour, twenty years later I’ve seen my writing open doors I could never have imagined from the start.

Having made some kind of a life for myself doing what I want, I’ve also established an aura, earned from the unpaid work, that provides opportunities I would have never found if I’d cut myself short before I’d even figured out what my writing could be—much less who I could be, both on the page and off. It took way longer than my instant-gratification-desiring ego machine would have agreed upon had we known its structure from the start, but at this point I’m almost able to support myself entirely from writing-related work, which itself is generated from the work I did for myself in leading up. Trusting my gut, seeking out allies who reinforce that feeling, challenging myself toward invention, and always looking ahead has shifted the unknowable morass of starting from scratch into a pursuit I’m still excited most every morning to get up and continue chasing through to the next step. The terrain is still as mysterious and unstable as ever, sure, but what else isn’t? Why should I wish to have it any other way?